Hogan's response was cut off by the unexpected viciousness in the girl's tone. For a moment there was nothing he could say and Helen filled in the gap, leaning forward.
"But why should you care? Your life hasn't been ruined by people bombing your home and your school. You haven't had everything change...you haven't had to give up love because of stupid men with stupid ideas."
"Helen-" This wasn't a twenty-something woman, Hogan thought, but a teenager with remarkable acting skills. It hadn't been maturity he had seen earlier in the girl, it was confidence in her ability to pull the wool over the eyes of the world. Hogan didn't have much patience for teenagers, as a rule, even less in war time.
"He is all alone. He has nobody to look after him, and nobody to love him. He was going to join the German army but he couldn't, and it devastated him."
"Helen..." Hogan could hear the girl justifying herself, but she hadn't yet given him a reason to need to. The gap in the information was making his stomach turn, and a part of him wanted to shut her up quickly before she said too much.
"You are such a big, brave hero. How many people have you loved? How many people have you loved that have been bombed by the enemy that you are trying to help? Do you think about the boys and girls that your bombs kill? What about the mothers, and fathers?"
Hogan thought about the men in his operation, some of whom he had lost. He thought about the people in England, Poland, France, Belgium and every other country that Germany had been working to crush for the past decade. He thought about Schultz, reminded suddenly that the man had been hospitalized and he knew nothing about his condition, or how it came about.
He also thought about the fact that he was arguing with a hormonal teenager, trying to be an adult well before she was ready. Her world of black and white, and right and wrong, was only beginning to convolute into a mesh of gray. But it wasn't his job to set her straight. And a part of him wanted to preserve what little innocence and hope might remain in the girl's world.
He kept his mouth shut and looked away from the glimmer of triumph in her eyes, refocusing on the situation at hand. As far as the package of information was concerned he could probably assume that the doctor had managed to get it safely to the next contact down the line.
He'd completed the mission, he realized, and should be worrying about getting back to camp as quickly as possible. That meant he needed to find his boot. Hogan pushed away from the counter and used the closely packed furniture to navigate the perimeter of the room once before a second realization hit him.
His boot was gone...maybe tucked out of sight in the room that he'd been sleeping in, but his jacket had been on the back of the chair, plain as day.
"Why was my coat out here?" Hogan asked carefully, looking at Helen. The girl didn't respond right away, her eyes darting about, and her look once more sliding towards guilt.
"I was...I..." She couldn't come up with a lie fast enough and from the look on her face Hogan could tell that her purpose had been juvenile at best.
"I gotta get outta here." Hogan said, then limped back into the pantry, the hidden room beyond barely illuminated by the light filtering from the kitchen. He had just located his boot and scanned the room once to make sure there was no other evidence laying about, when the pantry door closed and he again heard the rattle of the simple metal latch.
"Hey!" He shouted, rushing to the door and pounding on it. The door quivered violently, but the latch held. Still, it wouldn't take much to break the door open, he realized, at about the same time that Helen did. He heard the groan of the kitchen table being shoved across the floor, then the impact of the heavy piece of furniture against the pantry door. "Helen!"
"I don't have a choice." The girl wailed. "I'm sorry! I don't have a choice!"
It was midnight when the doctor finally came in to check on Schultz. LeBeau was asleep on the two chairs, though his rest had been fitful at best. Perched on the window sill, Newkirk had been nodding off himself, but like LeBeau he wasn't at peace. They were hungry, sore from the rough ride in the truck and the total lack of accommodation.
"Come to check on your experiment?" Newkirk asked the doctor, once more sticking to English.
The accusation hung in the air for a moment as the surgeon straightened his spine, then turned to consider the Englishman. "It bothers you, ja? The sergeant's treatment?"
"What bothers me is the way we've been treated. Prisoners of War are to be held in prison camps, not hospital rooms, and not without food or water for twelve hours!"
The doctor registered mild surprise then blithely responded, "The man guarding you should have seen to your comforts. He took his own meal several hours ago."
"Course he did." Newkirk said, "He wasn't expected to be the master of ceremonies was he?"
"You don't wish to participate in this man's recovery?"
"No. I bloody well don't. I said it when we first walked in 'ere, didn't I? He's the enemy. Why should I care if he lives or dies?"
"Yet, you do." The doctor countered quickly.
"You must be deaf." Newkirk sneered.
"Please, Corporal, mind your tone. We mustn't poison the environment with petty squabbles."
Anger flared fast and hard in his breast and Newkirk pushed away from the window, marching over to the Frenchman and shaking him to wakefulness. "Louie, we're leavin'. I'm tired of playin' Igor to his Dr. Frankenstein."
As LeBeau groggily got to his feet Newkirk pushed his way through the door. He ignored Wilmutt's startled shout and slapped his cap on his head as he marched down the hall to the stairs that would take him to the main floor. Before he could get there a vaguely familiar figure rounded the corner, her face solemn and pale. She took up plenty of room, and her face was set in its usual stern grimace, but she was clearly in emotional pain.
When her eyes settled on the British RAF uniform, then the Frenchman's uniform, the colors and styles were foreign to her. Her worry and fear turned to hatred and she wheeled on the Stalag 13 guard that had brought her to the hospital.
"Those evil men. They are the reason my Hansy is here. They did this to him. With their schemes and their trouble. They should be shot!" Her accusations built from there, disturbing the quiet of the hospital and rousing a handful of nurses and orderlies.
The doctor moved in to try to calm the woman, but the moment he suggested that the POWs were necessary for the patient's recovery, Mrs. Schultz railed against him, screaming for the arrest of Newkirk and LeBeau.
The guard that had brought Mrs. Schultz did what he could to calm the woman by hustling the Englander and the Frenchman out of the hospital. They were led at gun point to the staff car and forced into the back. When Newkirk bristled at the rough treatment the panicked guard slammed the butt of his gun into the Brit's solar plexus, then threatened to do the same to the Frenchman.
Louie put up his hands in surrender and placated the guard with promises of compliance, helped Newkirk to his feet and sat with the man silently all the way back to the camp.
"It's just as bloody well..." Newkirk muttered in response to the quizzical look LeBeau was giving him, rubbing at his belly as they stepped gingerly from the car in the camp yard.
LeBeau didn't say anything in response, marching without need for direction to the door of Barrack 2. The lights were off, and the room quiet when they entered, but it was clear that most of the men were still awake.
Kinch didn't even sound groggy when he asked, "What happened?"
The Frenchman sent a side long glance to Newkirk who, with a groan, climbed into his bed fully clothed. "We were kicked out of the hospital. Mrs. Schultz arrived and objected to our presence there."
"Why did they keep ya there so long?"
"Because Schultz is bein' treated by bloody Dr. Frankenstein. No offense to your curiosity but it's been a long day of nursin' fat sergeants, do you mind if we save this fascinatin' conversation for later?"
Kinch gave Newkirk an irritated look that the Brit couldn't have seen in the dark anyway, then blinked in surprise as LeBeau moved to the colonel's quarters and knocked lightly on the door.
"He isn't there, Louie." Kinch said softly.
"Oh." Louie said with a shrug, then moved toward the bunk that provided access to the tunnels. He was stopped halfway across the room when Kinch said. "He didn't come back with us."
Both Newkirk and LeBeau sent hushed demands for explanations into the darkness and Kinch sat up on his bunk. "The colonel heard the truck engine start up from the woods, and sent Carter back to check it out. He hung around long enough to get a good idea of what was going on. When the meeting with the underground contact got complicated he sent Carter and me back to camp to cover."
"Complicated? It was a simple meeting, what could have gone wrong?" LeBeau demanded over top of Newkirk's, "You left him out there with a bloody broken ankle on his own!?"
"We didn't have a choice. You know how stubborn he is, Newkirk, and he had a point. The contact that met us wasn't Mozart. It was his sister. Mozart is dead. The girl said he was shot while escaping the Gestapo."
"That's the ninth new underground agent in as many weeks!" Newkirk said from his bunk and Kinch found himself agreeing. "We have to go back out after him."
"I was thinkin the same thing but we couldn't go anywhere until we knew what was going on with the two of you."
"Well we're back and not likely to be playin' Florence Nightingale anytime soon, let's get crackin'." The minute Newkirk's boots hit the floor the door burst open and the lights were snapped on.
The same guard that had retrieved he and LeBeau from the hospital pointed a gloved finger at Newkirk and the Frenchman and said, "You, and you, come with me."
The command was met with a chorus of complaints and refusals, but this guard wasn't Schultz. He pointed his gun and cocked it, the simple sound bringing absolute silence to the room in seconds. "The commandant wishes for you to make a report." The guard said firmly.
Newkirk met Kinch's intense gaze and felt the man's voice in his head demanding that he cool down and do what he was told. Newkirk bit down hard on the inside of his cheek and grabbed his cap from the top of his bed, cramming it on his head.
"Don't have to get nasty about it." He grumbled as he passed the guard, marching back out into the compound. LeBeau followed, giving Kinch what he hoped was a reassuring promise that he would keep Newkirk in line to the best of his ability.
As soon as the guard was gone Kinch went back to the trick bunk and opened it. As he stepped into the hollow shaft he said, "Carter, keep an eye on the door." then descended into the tunnels intent on finding out how much progress Baker had made on the radio.
Hogan estimated that he'd been alone for about twenty minutes.
His first task had been to remove the splint, painfully force his ankle back into the boot and re-tie the supports around the throbbing appendage. Then he'd bruised both shoulders, throwing all his weight against the door to no great success. He'd found a tin and tried using it as a hammer, focusing the power behind his blows in an attempt to break the wood of the door. It had begun to splinter and give at about the same time that the back door opened and the kitchen once again filled with voices.
Hogan briefly entertained the hope that this was only the doctor and his daughter-in-law returning home. But the voices were younger, all masculine, and full of false bravado. In the few minutes he had left, Hogan shoved two of the heavier tins into his pocket, then dropped one of the canning jars. He was picking at the glass in the darkness, rushed by the sound of the table being dragged back, when the door was jerked open. Hogan thrust to his feet and backed all the way into the shadow, wanting a good look at his aggressor before he tried an assault.
He didn't expect that he would be facing a kid in a costume.